Mother of All Lies Review and Interview with director Asmae El Moudir
Mother of All Lies features some of the most arresting performances of the year and director Asmae El Moudir who received the Cannes Un Certain Regard Award for Best Director is almost singularly responsible. Asmae’s creation is a raw, intimate, and revolutionary form of documentary/feature that earned her best documentary at Cannes and was shortlisted for The Oscars as Best Foreign Film. The film delves into the haunting mysteries and deep-seated trauma that have silenced her family and neighbors for generations. In 2013 Asmae starts asking why there are no pictures, save that of King Hassan The II and why can’t the family talk in a house where “the walls have ears”. Asmae embarks on a deeply personal journey, not only to uncover hidden truths but also to create a safe space for her family to finally confront and heal their long buried pain. In this film, the special effects aren’t visual tricks—they’re the raw truths and emotions her family bravely chooses to reveal. It’s why their names are listed in large type on the movie’s poster.
The film opens with Asmae El Moudir trying to fit a new hearing aid for her domineering grandmother Zahra, who stubbornly resists and pretends it doesn’t work. When Asmae asks, “Why don’t you like photographs?” The grandmother shoots Asmae a withering look, “See, you can hear,” a smiling Asmae replies, prompting the grandmother to throw the aid away as if it were poison. Over time, we learn there’s a deep reason for her reaction. It is one of the traumatic memories in the household, and an outside world, where Hassan II inflicted harm, that director Asmae ties together.
The film then moves into the magical world of Asmae’s youth, including one very eventful Ramadan holiday in which she, like the other girls, inhabit a dream of what her later life would be like with parades, make-up, ornate dresses and travel to distant lands. We travel back in time with Asmae as we view footage of children preparing for the holiday and follow elaborate clay miniatures that the camera’s perspective grows to full scale. The cinematographic art from DP Hatem Nechi, who was awarded top honors at DOC NYC for the film, makes this miniature world and those to come, an immersive, magical experience. The one miniature picture that Asmae has hidden away shows her during this time. But when she reveals it to Zahra, grandmother spits out the word “slut” and walks away.
Of all the awards and praise Asmae received, the miraculous job of editing 500 hours of footage should be paramount. Asmae started shooting in 2013 trying to elicit answers to the family mystery; initially without the success needed to form her film.
“Imagine, I started with one picture and found myself with 500 hours of rushes,” Asmae explained. “So I took my small camera and started shooting in my house with my family asking them boring questions waiting for them. So after 7 years I found myself with 300 hours of rushes but there was nothing deep. I can feel that these people are still afraid to talk about themselves, still afraid to talk about the past. I realized, okay it’s hard to talk in this space where we had the trauma. So I said, Okay, if the walls in Casablanca have ears, let’s go, let’s move to another world (Marrakech) to talk freely and destroy the power of the past. And maybe the walls are gonna not have ears and maybe we in the end will have some kind of therapy.”
Asmae’s father’s (Mohamed) youthful dreams of being a soccer star came to an abrupt end when the government cordoned off the soccer field. The government turned the soccer “pitch” into hidden mass grave, to keep the slaughter a secret. It was then Grandmother locked everyone up and destroyed the pictures. Mohamed had the idea to create a miniature world to bring forgotten memories to life. Three months of hard work later Asmae and her father finished the studio with some help from local youths. In Marrakech, family and neighbors started to open up. We see each of the family members represented by a miniature figure work with Asmae to relive their history and their trauma with deeply personal tales re-lived and reimagined before our eyes.
The most dramatic story is from the family’s neighbor Abdallah. It is here we are party to a chilling moment in Moroccan history, The 1981 Bread Riots in which hundreds of Moroccans were killed, disappeared under the rule of Hassan The II. Abdallah tells the story of soldiers breaking down his door, arresting his family, and throwing him into a tiny, steaming, suffocating cell where people died around him. Then asked to drag dead bodies from the cell he courageously refuses. “You can kill me but I’m not going back into that cell!”, he says. Despite this, what he expresses when he picks up his own doll is how he feels guilt for having survived. Having worked at the V.A, I can tell you that survivor’s guilt is one of the hardest to leave behind. It involves forgiving ourselves. The riot victims faced this erasure as their bodies were hidden away for over twenty years. It is therapy but most of the magic does not happen on cue or always on camera and is often measured in years. Abdallah danced for the first time in 30 years during the Cannes Film Festival.
“I don’t like to talk about therapy in cinema because we provoke things in cinema, Asmae explained.” “But after one year now I can feel this therapy, I can feel that telling things and making them in a film can free you and can give you some kind of liberation from the childhood and adult trauma.”
Despite the emotional liberation, one cannot discount the toll this kind of project had on director Asmae El Moudir, who was also exposing to the world something deeply personal with no guarantee of support that would help her finish or sell the film.
“ It was a savage way to make this film. I have no timeline, no idea when I will finish the film and no idea when I will show the film. I couldn’t accept money without freedom, I needed both. I was feeling depressed, as a producer along with the pressure of talking about my family and myself. I felt exposed like I’m removing my clothes in front of people. Because we are a very conservative family and we are Muslim family it’s not easy . And we really respect something called grandmother, grandfather, or father, mother. I have to find a way to tell the big secret in the family, without looking for guilty people, without denouncing anyone, without putting anybody in danger. Because this was not what I planned from the beginning.”
Often we judge those who are very controlling like her grandmother, instead of trying to understand what events fostered their need to control everything and everybody around them. At the end of the film we see a lifting of the grandmother’s spirit as for the first time in many years she has allowed herself to go to the roof and see the sunset. It was, as Asmae points out, one of her goals from the beginning.
“I think it’s, this is a true kind of liberation and then freedom because my grandmother put herself in a bubble and she didn’t want to come out from her bubble”, Asmae said. “She was living in the seventies alone with the idea that talking is dangerous. So I did everything to push her to come out from her bubble and to understand that talking freely about your own past doesn’t hurt anyone.”
“So this is what I can call the therapy,” Asmae went on to say. “Today she can watch films, she can watch a series without thinking that the pictures are not good. So I think therapy doesn’t come after the first screening, but we can feel it after months and months of making this film. And maybe you can not have any therapy, but at least the therapy for me was making this film.”
Of all the honors Asmae El Moudir has received, one of the most meaningful must be winning the top prize in The Marrakech Film Festival. She became the first Moroccan director to capture that honor in the history of the festival. I talked to her about that honor and what her plans may be for the future.
“Having this support from Morocco was a very big surprise for me and was a gift for me also because I was happy to see that we can make a film about our past. Because I believe if we don’t talk about the past, we’re not going to talk about the future. Because the past, it’s not only the past, but also the way we can preserve our materials, our archive in the future,” Asmae pointed out.
“I had no idea how the film was going to be accepted in Morocco. I was very moved by the reaction at the screening in Marrakech. A full house of people are crying, clapping for more than 15 minutes. I think this screening gives me a lot of love for this country and to this audience who supported this film and felt the way about our characters as I did. Though others have talked about these things on National TV; maybe it’s the first time people are gonna watch a film in cinema in this hybrid format, with real people talking about this. For Abdallah it is the first time he is going to tell his own story,” Asmae went on to say.”
Though it reached the Best Foreign Film shortlist of the top 15 films, I would have loved to see it in the finals of the Oscar race but sadly they lacked the finances to screen it enough to have the 2,000 voting members see it. But one day we will see a Moroccan on the stage holding the gold. And I for one hope it is Asmae.
Asmae has great hope for the future as other filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola are fans of the film. But Asmae says her next feature is going to have a lighter tone.“I’ll take the time to see how I feel. I really want to make people laugh, not in a burlesque,” Asmae explained. “I like to criticize things with humor. Like the way I did with my grandmother; there was a lot of humor.”
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